The internet, especially the World Wide Web (WWW) or the Web, enables many services to be provided across the planet. Two examples of services are communication and commerce. These and other services are provided for and between web users having a multitude of different educational levels, aesthetic preferences, language capabilities, and so forth. Consequently, the Web has been adapted to accommodate the vast diversity of people that are from different countries or that live in different cultures.
One accommodation by the Web is a capability to use many different fonts. Fonts are digital files or code that represent instances of digital typefaces. Examples of typefaces include Courier, Helvetica, Literata, Times New Roman, and Bookerly. An example of a font is a file (e.g., “Helvetica-Bold.otf”) that represents a style of a typeface, such as bold Helvetica. Each font embodies a unique style and is often designed for one or a few related languages. A given electronic font or family of fonts can have options for different point sizes, various effects such as bold or italics, and so forth. Using a selected font, a computing application can cause characters to be presented on a display screen of an electronic device as glyphs respectively corresponding to the characters. For example, a web browser can display, on a screen of a smart phone, text from a web page using a locally-stored font.
To accommodate the diversity of languages and cultures of the people of the World, many different fonts have been created. The variety of existing fonts enables people of different languages and cultures to enjoy the Web in their own way. To achieve this, one font may differ markedly from another font. Further, a definition of a font may include not only an explanation of how individual characters are formed, but also an explanation of how each character relates to or interacts with other characters. A font definition can therefore be large and consume a significant amount of data, which places demands on both storage and transmission bandwidth capabilities of an electronic device. Consequently, individual electronic devices can only store a limited number of font definitions. Additionally, conveying a font definition to an end-user device to enable characters to be displayed using the font causes perceptible time delays that are aggravating to an end-user. Furthermore, with a metered connection such as with many cellular service plans, financial constraints can also hinder the downloading and thus the usage of different fonts.